New Orleans Journal; In One City, 2 Campuses Worlds Apart on War

Two black Avia hightop sneakers rest at the bottom of an abandoned locker in the Xavier University gym, and the size 15 feet that used to fill them are now swathed in military leather. Chris Harvey, a 6-foot 7-inch junior, had just become the basketball team's starting center last November when the mobilization put his athletic career on hold. Like many black students, this former reservist is in the Army now.

Similar stories of interrupted lives are being told across this modest campus, home to one of the nation's 41 historically black colleges. Many students here have left to fulfill military obligations, often incurred to help pay for college, and virtually everyone has friends or family in the Persian Gulf.

That personal contact is bringing bitterness; almost unanimously, Xavier students speak angrily about the war. They argue that the United States is being hypocritical by seeking to fight problems overseas while ignoring those at home, and that the nation is asking blacks to bear a disproportionate burden on both fronts.

Dr. Norman C. Francis, Xavier's president since 1968, used the word "pall" to describe the campus mood and said today's students felt more threatened by this war than the previous generation did by the one in Vietnam. The difference, he said, is that today's fighting comes as students are already fearful of what they see as their own waning economic prospects and an assault on civil rights.

The attitudes at Xavier are strikingly different from those at Tulane, a predominantly white university about mile away but a world apart in the backgrounds of its students. The proportion of Xavier students who have been forced from school because of military obligations is many times greater than that at Tulane. Perhaps as a result, it is almost as hard to find an Xavier student willing to defend the war as it is to find one at Tulane willing to criticize it.

The contrast suggests that in the absence of a draft, which helped form a generational division on the war in Vietnam, student views on this war are sculptered less by age than by forces like race and class.

"War Disrupts Campus," proclaimed the Xavier Herald, where one editor of the student newspaper wrote of "50,000 body bags per month" coming home and another described her husband's call to active duty as a form of slavery.

In a locker room discussion after basketball practice this week, Mr. Harvey's former teammates voiced similar disenchantment.

"I'd rather go to Canada," said Raymond Brothers, a 21-year-old senior guard from Lafayette, La. "The U.S. steps in in Iraq, but they've got apartheid in South Africa -- why doesn't the U.S. step in there?"

Merlin Peters, the team's co-captain, served four years as a marine before being spotted in a pickup game and offered a basketball scholarship to Xavier. He said his mother pressured him to join the service to get him away from the street corners of a New Orleans housing project.

"They're not over there by choice, by no stretch of the imagination," said Mr. Peters, whose brother is a marine in the gulf. "Blacks mainly join for economic reasons."

On a campus where nearly a third of the students are Jewish, some support for the war is concentrated in organizations like Hillel, which has sponsored several demonstrations in favor of United States policy. "Any time there's a threat to Israel we see it as a threat to ourselves as well," said David Fox, the 19-year-old sophomore who is president the group.

Most fraternity members support the war as well. The Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity house appeared a hotbed of social rest on the day after Mardi Gras, with the smell of stale beer wafting upstairs to the room where Spencer Ott sat watching a videotape movie. Mr. Ott won the agreement of his fraternity brothers when he said the United States was the only country capable of stopping President Saddam Hussein of Iraq. "It's our duty to the world," he said.

Mr. Ott, whose father is a Naples, Fla., investor, said he could already see domestic gains from the war, in a rising stock market and falling oil prices, and he was unpersuaded that it reflected social inequities.

"You could argue that there are more black people fighting because there are more black people who are poor," he said. "But it's better that they're doing something with their lives, not turning to crime and drugs like you see on T.V."

Like Mr. Ott, Mr. Harvey, the former Xavier center, did not envision himself being involved in a war. Though Xavier provided him with a full scholarship, friends said he joined the Army Reserves last spring

to earn some extra spending money: $112.48 a month for one weekend's duty as an administrative clerk.

The walls of his mother's home in the St. Thomas housing project here are papered with similar emblems of his strivings: commendations for his work in school, on the court and in summer jobs at the sheriff's office.

No one recalls hearing him complain when he learned he was being called up. He is now at Fort Polk, La., awaiting further orders.

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A version of this article appears in print on February 22, 1991, on Page A00012 of the National edition with the headline: New Orleans Journal; In One City, 2 Campuses Worlds Apart on War. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe